Bradley Wiggins (25 page)

The section behind the mood-lit riders’ cabin contains the toilet and behind that the shower room with automatic frosted doors, and enough space for even Christian Knees and Ian Stannard
to get their hair wet without bending over.

The rear section houses a comfortable massage area that doubles as a lounge and meeting room when not in use. It is no surprise to find a state-of-the-art coffee machine available here.

Underneath the top deck where all these features look proudly out through blacked-out glass on to the world below, a bank of washing machines and tumble driers restore dirty kit to pristine
condition for the next day’s efforts.

The best feature is saved until last. Picture the scene: five hours in the saddle in a rainstorm and it’s virtually dark when you finally squelch into the drenched finish area and through
the line. There are a thousand vehicles parked in the vicinity and you’ve never been to this town in your life. How do you find the sanctuary of the bus? Have no fear. The Team Sky bus has an
extendable rooftop antenna with a red beacon on top to guide you home.

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The joy of finishing and starting in the same town is the glittering jewel in a morning filled with trepidation.

‘On paper, it doesn’t look as bad,’ says Bradley Wiggins of today’s stage. Compared to yesterday, maybe, but there are still four classified climbs to scale, including
the impressive Port de Balès and the Peyresourde in the opposite direction to yesterday. Perhaps most dangerous of all to Wiggins and Chris Froome is the uphill finish at Peyragudes above
the mountain’s peak. With such a short stage into which to cram all this activity, it’s certain there will be fireworks. Vincenzo Nibali will see today as his last opportunity to unseat
one or other of the Team Sky dynamic duo and his attacking style makes it unlikely that he will accept defeat lying down.

The early action on the stage concerns the fight for the climber’s jersey which will be decided today. Thomas Voeckler, not content with his brace of solo stage wins, wants the polka dot
jersey to take home and is locked in battle with Astana’s Fredrik Kessiakoff. Voeckler took the jersey off him yesterday, but only four points separate them and Kessiakoff is determined to
snatch it back. It makes for a ferocious battle over the beautiful passes of the Col de Menté and Col des Ares, then on to the formidable Port de Balès before Voeckler can truly lay
claim to the jersey the whole of France is willing him to win.

It’s on the Port de Balès that Liquigas-Cannondale show that they are going to make the pace again. It all starts to get a little bit uncomfortable at the sharp end of the race and
the group thins quickly, but the favourites all maintain their places with the Peyresourde to come.

It’s now or never as they begin to tackle the legendary slopes for the second time in two days. Riders who have been out in front of the yellow jersey group are gobbled up one after
another like plankton in a whale’s mouth as the peloton’s relentless pace shows no sign of slowing. Lotto Belisol make their own move over the Liquigas-Cannondale and Team Sky-fronted
group, as Jurgen Van Den Broeck uses his teammate Jelle Vanendert’s attack as a springboard for his own move. In fourth spot overall, one can only lament Van Den Broeck’s bad luck in
the earlier part of this race when he lost crucial time to a mechanical fault: who knows what chaos he could have caused if he had been closer to Wiggins when the big mountains were reached?
Similar to Nibali in his attacking mentality, having twin dangers for Team Sky to look out for could have made this a very different race.

The Lotto Belisol attack has splintered the race and created a tiny group of only eight riders. Van Den Broeck is still there, as is Vincenzo Nibali and the Team Sky duo of Bradley Wiggins and
Chris Froome. Chris Horner of RadioShack-Nissan is hanging in there with the French stage winners Thibaut Pinot and Pierre Rolland. Cadel Evans hasn’t made the cut, but his BMC teammate in
the white jersey of best young rider Tejay van Garderen has. He now sits above his leader in fifth spot with Evans one behind and losing time.

Only the brave Alejandro Valverde remains ahead of this group from the earlier break which has led the way over today’s mountains. He is just over a minute in front but beginning to labour
within sniffing distance of the line.

Wiggins and Froome are cruising; the former with his back flat and high tempo spinning style, Froome more hunched but just as untroubled. They share a brief chat, gauging the state of the group
around them. Wiggins senses that Nibali in particular is finding the pace hard to maintain after his Herculean efforts of the last few days. At Wiggins’s instigation, Froome takes up the
pace.

In a glorious moment that will remain with British cycling fans forever, the two men move clear together. Now they will win this amazing race – the Tour de France will be won by a Brit for
the first time. Two of them will surely stand side by side on the podium in Paris where no man from these shores has ever stood before.

The question remains: who will be on the top step? Or even, who deserves to be on the top step? While these two great teammates have proved beyond all doubt they are the strongest two riders in
this race, the argument over who is the better of the two is far from being won. With Valverde looking likely to be reeled in as the pair fly up the last slopes to Peyragudes, Wiggins begins to
lose touch with Chris Froome’s back wheel. Froome looks around and gestures towards Wiggins, but its meaning is difficult to decipher. Come on, Brad? Are you OK, Brad? Or, do I have to wait
for you again, Brad? After a moment of daylight between them, hearts in mouths for all those watching, Froome pauses and allows his leader to rejoin him and they ride on proudly to the finish
unchallenged. They arrive nineteen seconds after the ecstatic Valverde, but clear of their true rivals.

They have conquered the Alps and the Pyrenees. The leader board looks like this:

The performance was greeted with unrestrained delight at Team Sky, but it wasn’t a sentiment universally shared. Many Tour followers and fans were of the opinion that the strongest man in
this race was about to finish it in second place. The exchange between the first- and second-placed riders in the final moments of the stage, allied to that memory of Froome being made to wait for
Wiggins at La Toussuire, has given the theorists much to talk about.

Laurent Jalabert, former world number one and a Tour de France legend said on French TV, ‘It wasn’t a grand gesture. You don’t do that between teammates. I think it darkens the
triumph of Wiggins.’

Brad, for his part, was self-critical, explaining that a dangerous belief that the race was won had caught him in a moment’s reverie: ‘I heard on the radio that we were alone, just
the two of us. I just lost concentration and started thinking a lot of things. In that moment all the fight went out of the window, everything to do with performance.’

Froome may well have been frustrated that their late deceleration cost him a second mountain stage victory in this Tour. With Valverde just seconds up the road he had been forced – either
by instructions or by his own commitment to duty – to slow and allow the courageous but tiring Spaniard to hold on to his narrow lead.

Wiggins seems to agree with that synopsis at the finish, when he simply says, ‘Chris really wanted to win the stage today.’

So, what do you think? Who deserves to win this race? Let us assume for a moment that Team Sky had not been able to keep Chris Froome after the disappointment of last year’s Vuelta and he
had come into this race as a rival of Wiggins on another squad. The first thing to recognise is that it would have had to be a damn fine team to challenge the dominance that Team Sky have displayed
throughout this race. Even without Froome’s climbing talent, they could call upon remarkable assistance via Richie Porte and Mick Rogers et al, even without Kanstantsin Siutsou. There was no
room on this team for riders like Geraint Thomas or Rigoberto Urán Urán either, both of whom would be expected to make sterling contributions to the team effort.

Or maybe Team Sky would have spent the money they’d saved on Froome on a replacement? What price for a Van Den Broeck joining their ranks? Or a Luis Leon Sanchez? Or Egoi Martínez?
Or Joaquim Rodriguez?

It cannot be denied that Froome has had two moments in the mountains where he has dropped Wiggins. What is uncertain is whether he could have made those gaps stick if he had truly been a rival.
One characteristic that Bradley Wiggins shares with his idol Miguel Indurain is the almost total lack of a jump, a quick acceleration to make an attack or cover one. He responds to moves by staying
calm and gradually lifting his own tempo until he rides himself back into contention. Putting a bike length into him halfway up a climb is no guarantee of dropping him by the top.

Then there is the time trial. Brilliant as Froome has proved against the clock in this race, can he really be expected to make up his losses to Wiggins in this department? He would need to not
just beat Brad in the mountains, he would need to cane him to ensure the losses he would be bound to sustain in the time trial would be absorbed.

Finally, and crucially, there is the experience of knowing how to lead a team and lead a race. Bradley Wiggins has won the respect and devotion of his teammates by delivering them the victories
they have grafted for at the Dauphiné, the Tour de Romandie and Paris–Nice. He has learned to soak up the pressure that dressing daily in the yellow of race leader brings to all who
dare to dream of victory. And in this race he has demonstrated the wise kingship of a considerate leader in his treatment of Evans, Nibali and the whole race. Even Indurain became something of a
rabbit in the headlights on his first grand tour as leader when Pedro Delgado stood aside for him in the Vuelta a España only to see the lieutenant-that-was-too-good-to-be-a-lieutenant
stutter in the spotlight of responsibility.

There is, of course, another possibility. What if Froome had just decided to disobey team orders? What if he had indeed put a couple of minutes into Wiggins on La Toussuire? What then? Would
Wiggins have been forced to support the new race leader, or would he have duked it out with his teammate toe-to-toe for the rest of the three weeks?

That would have been some race.

THE TOUR DE ROMANDIE
at the end of April is a nice race. Well organised, as you would expect in Switzerland, good roads, decent hotels and always a
strong field. Riders come here for one of two reasons: their last race to fine-tune their racing legs for the Giro d’Italia, or the first serious staging post to find out where they are on
the road to the Tour de France.

Team Sky were sending the backbone of what looked like being their Tour de France selection. The unit had been together in one form or another all year in races and training blocks, but this was
the first time Mark Cavendish had been brought in. Their frequently questioned decision to try and fight the Tour on two fronts through Wiggins and Cavendish was about to be tested for the first
time.

Throughout the entire season leading up to July, the plan was for Brad to be raced lightly and trained hard. However, a key part of that plan was that he should always race like a leader, and
the team should always race to win. They should get used to controlling races, and Brad should become comfortable with leading them and seeing off challenges.

Brad had only finished two races in 2011, and the team had won both of them, through Richie Porte in the Volta ao Algarve and through Wiggins himself at the prestigious Paris–Nice. His
final stage win up the classic mountain time trial of the Col d’Eze had set pulses racing, bringing back memories of Sean Kelly and Miguel Indurain winning the same stage in their pomp.
Romandie was where July really began for Team Sky.

Geraint Thomas had joined up with the team after coming back from the World Track Championships in Melbourne. He was following in Brad’s footsteps by mixing up his road and track programme
in an Olympic year. He was now a mainstay of that glorious team pursuit quartet who were pushing on from their title in Beijing to try to recreate that moment in London. With his programme focused
purely around the Tour, Brad wouldn’t be riding the track events at the Olympics, which hurt him, but a man only has one pair of hands. He would go from the Tour to the Olympic road race a
week later as part of a GB team that would try to emulate their superb win in Copenhagen, giving Mark Cavendish an Olympic gold to go with his rainbow jersey. His personal Olympic target would be
the time trial around Hampton Court in the few days after the road race.